Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Dead Man

"The Dead Man" is an 81-page story wrapped around
a single startling revelation. It's a black-and-white serial (launched in an
issue whose cover promised "More Colour!"), credited to unknown
writer Keef Ripley and former Luke Kirby
artist John Ridgway; it's set in the Cursed Earth, which would make it part of
this project even if "Necropolis" didn't pick up on some of its
threads. And if you're reading the Dredd books in order and haven't gotten to
it yet, you might want to close this entry right now and come back to it after
you're done.

But before I get into it, one point of contention that I can't avoid mentioning. So you're writing a 2000
AD serial in 1989; it's got a black
protagonist/narrator (good! a nice change from the 2KAD norm), who talks in a
not-quite-grammatical argot that involves "wuz" substituted for
"was" (less good), and has a deferential relationship to an older
man, and seems to do the eyes-bugging-out thing a lot (dubious, although it
makes sense on the grounds that his eyes eventually become a plot point). What
in God's name suggests that "Yassa," of all things, is a good
name for that character?

That said, talk to anybody who was reading 2000 AD around this time, and they'll tell you that
"the 'Dead Man' reveal" blew their mind. John Wagner wrote the series
as "Keef Ripley" so nobody would guess the Dead Man's real identity
until he was ready to say so, and reading the final three episodes is like
watching a chain of dominoes fall until the final domino sets off an explosion.
(I will say, though, that starting the current edition with a left-hand page
rather than a right-hand page does the story a disservice a couple of times
toward the end: the climactic revelation in part 11 really ought to follow a
page-turn, and the double-page image of Phobia and Nausea gets cut in half
here. Also, I gather that this version was initially supposed to be called "Tales of
the Dead Man," as in the version shown up top, but got changed to
the shorter title at some point.)

It's also interesting that this is such an un-Wagner-like
story in a lot of ways, especially in that it's about darkening mood rather
than intricate plot. The premise starts as "a stranger comes to town"
and turns into "a man goes on a journey." Aside from the one panel
where the Dead Man reaches out for Yassa, there's nothing like an action
sequence until the end of the third chapter. The conflicts with the grunts
basically just seem to be there to provide conflict more concrete than the
scary premonitions everyone keeps getting, and to demonstrate that the Dead
Man's a crack shot.

At its core, though, this is 13 chapters of the Dead Man waking
up, recuperating, figuring out his real identity and remembering what happened
to him. In the city, his body reflects the city (he is the law, the law is the
state, therefore he is the state); in the Cursed Earth, his body reflects the
landscape too, as Yassa mentions the first time he sees him. The razed
landscapes of the dead cities, and the burning acid waters, are scarier than
the grunts or even the Sisters themselves: Ridgway's images of the ruins of
Crowley are chilling because they're so minimal, nothing but a few charcoal-looking husks of
beams and silhouetted ashes.

Colin Smith's lengthy
discussion of "The Dead Man" mentions Yassa's throwaway line of
exposition at the beginning of chapter 10--"my pap says it's chem pools in
the hills turns the river bad"--as an example of Wagner's particular
gifts. Rereading the story with the knowledge that Ripley
is Wagner, you see some dry jokes that tip his hand, like the little girl named
Flotilla, or the central-casting preacher Larry Larkin quoting nonexistent
Scripture and getting called on it, or Yassa insisting that "Dog meat'll
poison you! That's what it'll do!"

It's a very nice touch that Ridgway draws "The Dead
Man" in a style that doesn't look much like his Judge Dredd work: it's a horror-Western, built around light sources slicing through shadow and cross-hatching. (Ridgway's inking here reminds me a little of Alfredo Alcala,
actually.) I guess we know as of the cover of Prog 661 that Dredd's eyes are
blue--or, at least, that the replacement eyes he got after "City
of the Damned" are blue. Is the blinding of Yassa supposed to echo Dredd's
in that story? It seems like a strange plot point to repeat without
intentionally making something of it.

Yassa's diction on the final page abruptly gets a lot more
eloquent after one more "wuz," just as the color fades in for the
first time in the entire story (and note how Ridgway leaves most of the page's
first panel in black and white, just letting sepia seep in at the edges:
nice!). The only other time his narration shifts to that kind of fancier speech
is when he's discussing remembering what
happened later on ("It's a question I've asked myself many times in the
madness where I now dwell..."). I wonder if the idea was originally that
Yassa has grown to manhood in darkness and is narrating part of the story many
years later; his return in "Necropolis" seems to have been more a
spontaneous gesture than something that was planned all along. It's also odd
that Dredd's talking in a more portentous mode than usual ("It will not
return--not unless all goes ill with me!") even after he's recovered his
memories.

The concluding bit of text on that last page of "The
Dead Man"--"continued overleaf"--is brilliant: this is not just
a story that ties into Judge Dredd, it's
an "ending" that segues directly into the Dredd story that begins on the
next page, which in turn springs out of
Dredd episodes that have been running alongside "The Dead Man." (The
coloring matches so well that I have to wonder if Will Simpson colored that
final "Dead Man" page, too.) This is a story, in other words, that
could only have its full impact
at the time and in the way it was first told: as a serial running alongside
another serial in a context where no one would have guessed they're as closely
linked as they are. After that, the secret was out, as we see on the cover of
the initial paperback collection, below (drawn by Sean Phillips).

Next week: we pick up immediately after the
final page of "The Dead Man," with The Complete Case Files 14, featuring "Tale of the Dead Man" and
the whole remarkable "Necropolis" sequence.

2 comments:

One of the nice things about The Dead Man is that it was, as you say, designed to have its impact read in serial form at the time, in an anthology title. I remember thinking it was actually a pretty dull read for most of its run which of course made it all the more powerful when the revelation happenedGood as it was, I can't imagine it having the same impact when read today unless the reader was working through the back issues as opposed to the collected anthologies...

The big revelation in part 11 was also on the right hand side of the pages in the original comics (although the double page of Nausea and Phobia was not split), but man, that twist still blew my 15-year-old mind.

It was especially disconcerting when that panel where the Dead Man finally says his name was immediately followed by "I'm Manny - Me Fly", one of those bizarre little one-off Dredd stories that don't mean anything. It was a long, long week before the next issue came out, and I still remember being absolutely convinced there was no way it could really be the big man...

I think it's also worth noting that during this period, there was a brief window when 2000ad almost became the Judge Dredd Megazine by default, a year or so before that spin-off started. There were three issues where four out of the five stories were all set in the Dredd universe - the main strip, Chopper and Judge Anderson spin-offs, and the Dead Man. The only non-Dredd strip was, thankfully, Zenith.

About Me

I write about pop music and comic books for a lot of places. My book "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean" was published by Da Capo in 2007; my book "Live at the Apollo" was published by Continuum in 2004.